In a surprising move, the govt announced several amendments to the finance bill 2023. Among the changes is the change in taxation status for debt mutual funds. Taxation status from 1st April 2023 Funds holding 65% or more of Indian equity or Indian equity ETFs are equity funds (no change in this) Funds holdings less…
Continue reading →This article compares my stock portfolio with an equivalent investment in a Nifty index fund and the Nifty 100 Low Volatility 30 TR index. We post this comparison each month. Before we begin, new readers need to appreciate the context of these investments. I started direct equity investing only after achieving a comfortable level of…
Continue reading →In Feb 2022, a 31-year-old reader named GB shared his financial journey: From 5 lakhs in debt to building a corpus worth six years in retirement. This is an updated audit. About this series: I am grateful to readers for sharing intimate details about their financial lives for the benefit of readers. Some of the…
Continue reading →Before the end of 2023, AI will play a huge role in almost all spheres of life. At freefincal, we have been obsessed with creating a CHATGPT-based AI bot to answer reader questions. More about this is below. First, let us discuss why we need to stop criticising AI and accept it! Every time someone…
Continue reading →This is a debt mutual fund screener for fund selection, fund portfolio tracking and learning. It also includes hybrid funds that invest in bonds. It will satisfy investors who wish to invest in money market funds, banking and PSU funds etc. The credit quality of the bonds in the portfolio and the bond maturity profile…
Continue reading →A reader asks, “I intend to follow a 50:50 portfolio bucket approach post my retirement for the retirement goal. The 50% equity part would be predominantly invested into a Large cap mutual fund. For the 50% debt part, I intend to break it up into a) liquid/money market funds that will cover the next five…
Continue reading →A reader wants to know how many mutual funds have outperformed their benchmarks during the current bear market (or sideways market, if you will). So in this article, we look at the annualized return over the last 17 months from Oct 2021. Note: No part of this article or fund listing should be construed as…
Continue reading →After we reported that Only 3 out of 28 mid cap MFs consistently beat Nifty Midcap 150, many readers wished to include a mid cap index fund in their portfolio and wanted to know how to choose one. As regular readers may know, we have always maintained that the Nifty Next 50 is an excellent substitute…
Continue reading →This index fund screener is based on tracking error and returns difference wrt benchmarks (aka tracking difference). The screener will help users evaluate how efficiently an index fund has tracked its underlying benchmark. It will also help a understand how tracking a midcap index or the Nifty 100, 500 differs from tracking the Sensex or…
Continue reading →The equity market has gone nowhere since October 2021. However, if you are losing patience and thinking about stopping or redeeming your equity investments, don’t! Now is the best time to invest! Even if we buy into the (incorrect*) belief that “over the long term, the stock market will move up always”, equity investing is…
Continue reading →Here is a list of attributes necessary to select and stay invested in actively managed mutual funds if you do not wish to invest in passive mutual funds. Before we begin, we caution the young earner that less than half the active funds in any category manage to consistently beat an accessible benchmark and it…
Continue reading →We received an interesting email from Mr Rangarajan a few days: “When I read your article about pension, I remembered my father’s situation. When he was an advocate earning Rs 1,000 per month in 1934, he joined judicial service on a payment of Rs 250 per month”. This is the financial journey (1923-1983) of a…
Continue reading →This is an ETF screener based on tracking errors and tracking differences (ETF return minus index return). The screener will help users evaluate how efficiently an ETF has tracked its underlying benchmark. The tracking error is the ETF’s standard deviation minus index monthly return differences. The lower the tracking error, the more efficient the ETF…
Continue reading →A reader was trying to convince his friend that retirement planning is the number one priority in investing. All others, including our children’s education, come next. He wrote to me looking for “logical support”, as he put it. He was, however, sorely disappointed with me for believing just the opposite. So this is my attempt…
Continue reading →We have repeatedly shown that most active mutual funds struggle to beat category benchmarks. This is not just a trend seen in large cap funds – Active Large Cap Mutual Funds vs Nifty 100 performance analysis. Contrary to popular belief, the trend is also seen among mid cap funds as well – Only 3 out of…
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